Kiš, Kish or Kiški? : A Bibliometrics study of the domain Assyriology

Abstract: This thesis aims to examine how the domain Assyriology can be analyzed with bibliometrics. It uses the domain analytic perspective by Birger Hjørland and Hanne Albrechtsen. The metadata was collected through the Web of Science and the dataset covers the years 2016-2020 from the journals Akkadica, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Ancient Near Eastern studies, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions and Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie. The domain was studied by analyzing citations, the documents, languages, place of publication, the age of references and the authors by visualizing patterns in figures and tables. Co-authorship analysis was used to display collaboration between countries. The content was analyzed with co-citation analysis of references and co-word analysis of title words to visualize the knowledge structures within the domain. The study found that Co-word analysis did give a general idea of different knowledge patterns but there were few clear structures. The co-citation analysis was found to reveal more clear structures though the references had a low citation rate and so might not be representative of the whole domain. It was found to be effective to use tables and figures to visualize certain aspects and patterns within the domain. In conclusion, bibliometrics was found to be effective to gain knowledge about the domain Assyriology. This is a two years master's thesis in Library and Information Science.